Doomsdays

by Jeffrey Thomas

  The first casualty of this bitter conflict was Mark (who was no relation to King Mark, one of the greatest kings of the kingdom) of the Left Bag (or First Bag, as they liked to call it, claiming it had been hurled over the fence first – though none of the Left Bag’s people had yet come into existence at that point and thus could not prove their claim). Mark was gathering twigs for the roof of the palace which was being erected inside the Left Bag (the palace’s thatched roof would protect it from rain that entered the trash bag through its many lacerations). He was part of a team of twig-gatherers, but on his own wandered too close to the Right Bag (or True Bag, as its inhabitants preferred to think of it).

  Through a rent in its dark green skin, one of the Right Bag’s citizens, who had dubbed himself Tino, saw Mark collecting twigs that ought to belong to those of the True Bag, and he grew enraged. When Mark strayed impudently near to the bag, Tino and another Right Bagger, JP (who had inadvertently named himself after a pub, JP’s, a menu from which he’d found in the bag, assuming that JP must be the actual owner) reached their arms through holes in the bag’s membrane and seized hold of Mark. Tino jerked Mark’s head (a pine cone) one way, while JP tugged at his pipe cleaner arms in another direction. The attack was over quickly, and left Mark in the pieces he had originally willed into a body for himself. The combined energy of their violence upon him overrode his own energies of cohesion. As soon as Mark’s parts thudded to the leaf-carpeted ground, his consciousness dissipated, never to be restored – at least in this realm of existence.

  After he didn’t return from his twig foraging, Mark’s decapitated pine cone was spotted the next chilly morning by one Leigh Haig, whose own mind and powers of perception were focused through the bright yellow cooking timer he used as a head. When he found Mark’s remains, this plastic timer set itself to five minutes to send out a clicking code of alarm. Suddenly, two other puppets sprang up from under the sparkling, frost-painted leaves where they’d been lying in ambush, and set upon Leigh. These assassins-in-wait were called Koish and Stephen Darkkat. Koish’s arms were two rusty, cheap serrated steak knives. As if to complement his partner, Stephen had a spoon for one arm and a fork for the other, and walked about on a scissoring nutcracker. Haig put up a noble battle, whipping his twig arms at the two warriors, but Koish hacked off one scarecrow arm and the other arm was pinned between Stephen’s fork and spoon so that Leigh was helpless when Koish administered the killing blow – which sent his chittering timer head rolling, still counting off a final minute of time before it went silent.

  The war escalated. The Right Baggers tried to lure several of the squirrels that lived within the kingdom (using nuts they gathered and broke open in the toothed crotch between Stephen Darkkat’s legs), hoping to use these mighty beasts as mounts, but the squirrels would have none of it. In fact, a Right Bagger named RoseMary, who managed to seat herself upon one of these ferocious monsters, found herself on a wild ride through the forest and then high up into a tree, where she finally lost her hold on the creature’s gray fur and plummeted to the ground many feet below. There, her marionette’s body shattered into its constituent pieces and the life went out of them all.

  Soon, the fighting had devolved into all-out chaos, despite the intentions of both armies to utilize calculated strategies. The immense green lawn bags that were their rival kingdoms-within-the-greater-kingdom sagged and deflated as their contents were ravaged for weapons and defenses. Catapults were created which launched acorns and stones; crossbows, mounted on wheels, were invented whose windlasses took two puppets to wind. They made clubs, swords, lances; armor out of tin cans, shields out of the tin cans’ lids. It became a frenzied Punch and Judy show on an apocalyptic scale.

  One Left Bagger (or First Bagger), instead of taking a name inspired by the junk and trash within her bag of origin, had appropriated for herself a name that was well-known and well-loved within the kingdom – that of the late, tragic Isolde the Beautiful. The people of the departed princess’s palace heard of this impudence and were outraged; it was this as much as anything which inspired them to finally step forward and act, instead of merely watching the two armies attempt to enact genocide upon each other. Isolde’s widower husband, King Mark, ordered assassins from his palace to intervene, and they commenced a skillful guerilla warfare against both of the opposing armies.

  The first victim of these assassinations was the imitation Isolde herself. One chill November day, as afternoon dimmed toward an even chillier twilight, Isolde and another First Bagger named Trygve sat beneath a leafless bush, thinking they were well hidden, weaving a new rope for their crossbow to replace the one slashed by a True Bagger’s blade. While they worked they exchanged a quiet conversation, Isolde by clicking against each other the sharp, open safety pins at the ends of her medical tubing arms, and Trygve by punching rubber keypads on a pocket calculator torso (numbers raced across the calculator’s little window display like a horde of ants hurrying to their nest).

  Without the warning sound of a crumpled leaf or snapped twig, King Mark’s terrorists were abruptly upon them. Isolde managed to stab a safety pin hand into one warrior’s styrofoam ball head and jerk it off his shoulders, killing him, before the others brought her down and tore her apart, herself. Trygve was also ripped asunder, blows raining on the calculator body, numbers flashing in the little window like screams translated into a silent code.

  Next, it was two Right Baggers – named Eddie and Jake – who fell prey to surprise guerilla attacks. This was a major blow, since Eddie and Jake (as their tough-sounding names might suggest) were two of the most ruthless and swaggering of the True Bag soldiers (in fact, they had both taken their names from a crime novel with musty yellow pages thrown out with the rest of the Right Bag trash). It happened this way: Eddie and Jake were on guard duty one night, positioned at the mouth of the Right Bag, when a stick snapped in the darkness beyond. Jake advanced warily on his toothbrush legs to investigate, holding ready his weapon – a metal spatula with its edges made sharp by diligent rubbing against stone. While he was thus distracted, two assassins rushed in on either side of Eddie, who was too busy watching his friend’s receding form to realize his own danger. There was a swoop of a sword (a metal ruler that measured by the inch, pica and agate, which had also been sharpened against stone), and Eddie was neatly decapitated. Jake spun around too late; an old moss-stained brick, hoisted by rope into the tree above him an hour earlier, was released – striking him down and wounding him badly enough that he was easily finished off by the warriors who had executed Eddie.

  When the Left and Right Baggers finally realized that they were both under attack from a common enemy, they did something that was perhaps even more suicidal than endeavoring to annihilate each other. They joined forces, became allies, and declared war on the microcosmic kingdom of King Mark within this broader macrocosmic kingdom. Now, King Mark had truly had enough. He, in turn, contacted the other palaces of the kingdom, and persuaded their rulers that these newcomers were too arrogant, too uncivilized, too much of a threat to tolerate. And so it was that King Mark gathered his own, far more powerful allies...

  A swarm of elite troops representing King Mark and his allies fell upon the twin trash bag palaces. Had the weather been warmer, these troops might now be wearing live stag beetles strapped to the ends of their arms like new hands, jagged jaws ready to seize whatever crossed their path. A group of these doll warriors might carry a live snake like a battering ram and release it into the enemy fortress to cause havoc and damage, distracting the enemy or even crushing soldiers under its frantic squirming body while more troops swept in with spears and clubs. But even in this cold weather, with many animals already hibernating, the efforts of the elite troops were still formidable indeed.

  With great risk and cunning, a raccoon had been caught the night before, snared in a net and then bound with ropes. This night, the bound animal was led spitting and squealing furiously to the Left Bag, prodded from behind with spears both to keep
it moving forward and to keep it properly agitated. At last, it was prodded into the mouth of the Left Bag as its restraining ropes were released...

  From outside, the elite unit listened with satisfaction as the enraged raccoon went on a rampage throughout the bag, which squirmed and thrashed like a vast failing heart. At last, the raccoon clawed larger a small hole in the side of the dark green lawn bag, and escaped through it, leaving great destruction in its wake. The fortress the Left Baggers had constructed inside the bag had collapsed and caved in when the raccoon had blown through it like a living cannonball. Taking advantage of the disorientation and destruction the huge monster had inflicted, the warriors moved in and picked off a good number of dazed survivors who had stumbled outside blindly.

  One of these unfortunates was named Dusty, who was in fact dusty and covered in pine needles upon blundering outside into the screaming cold of night. There was a twanging sound of multiple rubber bands, like the strummings of some strange orchestra, and then suddenly Dusty was full of tiny arrows outfitted with clippings from beautiful blue jay feathers to make their flight true. Like St. Sebastian swooning in his ecstasies, Dusty staggered along several more steps before collapsing to the leafy floor of the kingdom. Dusty’s head was that of a teddy bear groom wearing a top hat, a wedding present which had had its head ripped off by the actual groom upon the day of his divorce (said divorce having prompted the move that resulted in so many treasures being stuffed into these two bulging Santa Claus-like sacks of trash). This teddy bear head still smiled up at the frigid stars that showed through the barren tree branches, despite having lost an eye in the raccoon attack and having been turned into a pin cushion by miniature arrows.

  A team of the most powerful puppet warriors had arduously dug up a large stone the day before, and had rolled it across the floor of the kingdom during this night. Previously, it had been noted how the Right Bag lay in a bit of a depression in the earth. This mossy boulder was rolled right up to the edge of that hollow by the straining soldiers, laboring like a sweating team of pyramid builders, and then pushed over the lip to rumble down upon the Right Bagger settlement. Again, this was an act that created great destruction to the fortress constructed within the bag, and was the source of much pandemonium.

  A True Bagger who had adopted the name Jeffery A. Stazak (his first name tragically misspelled as was the case with far too many Jeffries), with his head and body formed from one solid unit (dark-colored glass in the shape of an African-American woman, the interior of this bottle still sticky and smelling of maple syrup), was struck with a fusillade of stones as he attempted to flee. Finally he was brought down, his body cracked and splintering, and a soldier emerged from the underbrush to shatter his glass head from his glass shoulders, releasing a few drops of thick ichor and emitting more of that sweet, delicious smell.

  Just as one insolent Left Bagger had taken the name Isolde, inspired by a much-mourned princess of the kingdom, so had a Right Bagger been inspired to take the name of another much-beloved and mourned hero of the kingdom, this one named Tristan. This pretender-Tristan, rather than having the head of a grinning jester like the original Tristan, possessed for his body and head a dark red resin Buddha figurine, smiling jovially and with legs crossed, his lap meant for the burning of incense cones. With his own pudgy legs folded beneath him, the Buddha instead scurried about on legs constructed from slender lengths snipped from a car’s radio aerial. The Buddha’s smug smile seemed to mock the memory of the true Tristan; the elite troops had been waiting to corner this enemy. They descended upon him like a flock of silent birds. The Buddha remained smiling even as he was lassoed with little ropes, dragged down, and drawn and quartered. It took some effort to break the resin figurine, but with enough blows from enough diminutive clubs, it was done.

  The next morning after this night of much death, the ragged and demoralized survivors of the twin bags surrendered to the armies of King Mark and his allies, who showed a proud and haughty mercy and agreed to admit them into their ranks as slaves.

  Thus it was that one former Left Bagger – who had failed to find a proper name for itself amongst the rubble within its bag and had thus dubbed itself simply Nameless – became a personal servant to Iseult of the White Hand, daughter of the Duke, one of King Mark’s allies in the war. Nameless was required to sit behind the beautiful Iseult and comb the silky white-blond hair plugged into her plastic doll head twice a day (even though this obsessional combing was no doubt the cause of her hair becoming more and more sparse). Not a bad fate, actually, considering the demise of so many of Nameless’s former comrades. Other prisoners enjoyed similarly merciful fates as they were adopted into the various kingdoms-within-the-kingdom.

  None of the puppets of the kingdom could speak in audible voices like the giants who lived beyond the fence that enclosed the kingdom (except to drum or tap or clack out rhythms of code with the various components of their bodies), and so none of them could truly address one another by the names they had taken. These names were something they had adopted chiefly so that they might address themselves in their own minds. But as prisoners, they retained these names, were not stripped of them or assigned new ones. So it was that one former Left Bagger continued to think of herself as Lisa Wallen, whose shapely body was a novelty hourglass egg timer and whose smooth white featureless head was a plastic container of dental floss (which she had used to secure her head to the hourglass). Lisa was one of those prisoners who had been given a comparatively pleasant job, in her case as a personal servant to King Mark. And so it was, too, that a former Right or True Bagger continued to perceive himself as being an entity named Matt Schwartz, whose head was a brooch of a butterfly – like a fossilized insect of glittery mock gold and faux gemstones – and whose body was contrastingly composed of greasy auto parts, three chew-marked pencils for a balancing tripod of legs. Matt was one of the slaves whose job it was to tear down the last remnants of the twin fortresses, and to help strip the membranes of the twin bags down to small pieces that could be made into rain-resistant outer cloaks for a good many of the kingdom’s numerous denizens.

  There was even a couple named Michael and Karen – he, of King Mark’s people and she a one-time Left Bagger – who fell in love and became so devoted that they took on the same last name of Templin. Not content with that marriage, they went so far as to marry their very bodies together into one. His had been chiefly composed of a radio-controlled toy race car standing on one end, and hers from a curling iron. In a tender ceremony, other Left and Right Baggers and even King Mark’s subjects helped bind their bodies together with bits of string, dried blades of wild grass, the electrical cord from Karen’s body and dental floss from Lisa Wallen’s head.

  And so, peace again reigned throughout the kingdom, just in time for the snows that would soon fall and fill the fenced-in universe, and make travel difficult or even impossible at times. There would be a kind of mellow hibernation. Perhaps, come spring, there would be new conflicts. The rebellions of vengeful slaves. Perhaps King Mark and the Duke would sever their alliance and go to war for this or that reason.

  Or perhaps a new, brimming bag full of trash would be cast over the rusty web-like wall that encompassed the kingdom of the puppets.

  For now, however, this story had ended. It is time to tuck oneself under a bed of moldering leaves, to burrow oneself into the life-giving polluted black soil. To silence the humming thoughts that occupy skulls made from tea cup and thread spool, to still the movement of bodies made from TV remotes and half-rolled toothpaste tubes. A sifting fall of leaves. The first sifting flakes of snow as a blizzard drifts ponderously nearer. But beyond the chain-link fence, the streaming comets of the metal beasts continue to blaze back and forth through the night. Never ceasing in their seemingly pointless orbits. Metal beasts that will bring their giant owners to this store, that mall, in order to purchase this toy, that appliance...all of which will one day end up discarded. Some of which will one day lift their heads and bodies from
rotting leaves or melting snow – so as to enter into a new phase of existence entirely.

  But until that day of spiritual rebirth – good night, children. Dream rich, dark dreams steeped in the juices of wonder, and in the power of possibilities.

  The End

  Gasp

  About three-quarters of the way through a videotape of the 1976 Japanese film IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES, Art shut the movie off so he and Rubina could make love on their sofa.

  On top of her, smiling down, Art said, “I’m surprised I made it this far.” The movie was shockingly erotic, the actors courageous as they indulged in actual intimacies (though Art had commented that it wouldn’t take much courage for him to “act” with that leading lady, with her giddying little girl sobs of pleasure).

  In fact, Art had wanted to keep the movie running while they were entwined on the couch, half out of their clothes, but Rubina had found that to be a little too much.

  “It’s based on a true story,” Art told her, as he rolled his belly against hers in a rhythm like waves on a beach. “They got more and more obsessed, until even strangling each other wasn’t enough. Do you want me to tell you how it ends?”

  “No. I want to see the end,” Rubina panted against his shoulder, her feet hooked over his calves. She had closed her eyes. She did not mean to summon the face of the Japanese actor, but suddenly he seemed to be the one staring down at her. The impression of this alien face gazing intently at her was so real that it startled her eyes back open.

  “Where did you get the tape?” Art asked, leaning in to kiss her just under the thrust jaw of her tilted head.

  “I think it was my uncle’s,” she said quietly.